Me and my first editor Gary Kauffman in the office of The Advance-Leader in Ligonier, Indiana, in 1987.

Twenty-five years ago, Jan. 4, 1993, I started working at The Goshen News.

A cub reporter, fresh out of Goshen College, I had a lot to learn. Fortunately, between editors, co-workers, sources and readers I never lacked guidance — nor correction.

I was not one of those people who had to go through a few careers or majors before finding “the one.” I’ve wanted to be a news reporter since middle school.

At West Noble Middle School, we had a student newspaper and yearbook. The newspaper was printed via — wait for it — a mimeograph. Yeah, I’m that old. Better than stamping by hand I suppose.

Anyway, it was there that I fell in love with the publishing industry, specifically journalism. Any of my West Noble friends can attest to that — and my penchant for writing teen romance novels.

In high school, our only publication was the yearbook, so I worked there usually with classmate Traci Gee (now Runge). Knowing how much I enjoyed reporting, my high school set up a senior internship at the local newspaper, The Advance-Leader. There was a change in editors between when the agreement was made and when I started. So when I popped in on my first day (the last period of the school day), poor Gary Kauffman got a shock. He’d inherited me and no one had told him.

Gary rolled with it, though, and became a teacher, mentor and lifelong friend.

Because The Advance-Leader was owned by Kendallville Publishing Co., once a week I would head over to The Kendallville News-Sun to help put the weekly together. There I got to know Dave Walter and Wayne Steffen. Longtime readers of The Goshen News might recognize both names.

I would go sit on Dave’s desk and chat while he was supposed to be working. Dave, only recently out of college, would tease me by singing “Oh, Sheila.” Over the course of my senior year, we got to be friends.

Wayne, formerly of Kendallville, worked at The Goshen News. I was a Wayne fan. I enjoyed his writing and wanted to learn everything I could from him. Little did I know he was also a heck of a guy. Gary, Dave and Wayne took me under their wings, taught me what they could; helped me through college (and life) and we remain friends today. I could not have had better professional teachers. Thanks guys!

At Goshen College, my journalism classes were with Stuart Showalter. Again, another great teacher just landed in my lap. Both Wayne and Dave were at The Goshen News, so I had an in there. I did some freelance work during college and when it was time to graduate I got an internship at The News.

Fortunately for me, when my internship was up, The News needed a couple of reporters. They hired me and Marshall V. King. You might know his name, too.

I’ve been around ever since, covering pretty much everything.

I hope you’ve enjoyed having me around as much as I’ve enjoyed being here.

I’ve not spent a lot of time traveling around our neighbor to the north. No, I don’t mean Canada. I’m talking about Michigan. Yep, a northern Indiana girl my whole life and I can probably count on two hands how many times I’ve crossed the northern state line.

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I took a vacation up to Hillman, which is just west of Alpena.

For those of you who don’t know where Alpena is, hold out your left hand. See the top of your index finger? That’s about where Alpena is located.
Anyways, we spent the week in a one-room fishing cabin, less than a stone’s throw away from a large lake. We had our own dock that we could launch our kayaks from. Or in our case, fish from.
The winds were a little too strong for a newbie kayaker as myself, so I stayed on shore with my daughter. We fished and fished and fished.

The Mr. decided to brave the waves.
It was relaxing. Every once in a while, it’s good to leave the mad pace of work-school-responsibilities-social media, and vacation in a spot that has little if no phone reception. Our cabin had access to Wi-Fi, but my phone kept losing the signal.
The three of us enjoyed sleeping in, grilling, campfires and, oh yeah, fishing every single day.

We did leave the cabin one day for a trip to the Mackinac Bridge and St. Ignace. I had been to Mackinaw and Mackinac once before when I was a teenager. The bridge is indeed a wonder.

My husband drove us to St. Ignace while hunting for this little pasty shop out in the middle of nowhere, Lehto’s Pasties. That’s all that is sold there, and my goodness, their pasties are huge! The tender, flaky crust pockets a full meal of beef, potatoes and onions.
We stopped at a state rest park along Lake Huron and ate, feeding the seagulls the few morsels we had left while laughing at their antics.
And yes, we got pulled into the tourist trap area of Mackinaw City. But it was fun strolling around, eating fudge from Kilwin’s and looking at some of the shops that had not been there 30 years ago.
When we drove back to the fishing cabin, we took the lake view drive along U.S. 23. Not a lot of Lake Huron was visible because of trees, but when there were breaks, the view was stunning. We could see small beach strips that led out to beautiful green water before entering the deeper blue parts of the lake.
What surprised me most was the lack of people. I don’t know enough about that particular area to explain why there weren’t people out enjoying the sun and waves, but it definitely sparked my curiosity.
I really enjoyed our excursion into northern Michigan and I’d like to see more. I’ve been to Traverse City and found it equally pretty and I’ve been to Sault Ste. Marie, but that’s the extent of my travels in the northern region.
Like I said, I’d like to see more — especially the lighthouses. Perhaps next year we travel all the way to Whitefish Point and stop in for a visit at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
Thanks for the adventure, Michigan!

Sheila Selman is regional editor and digital content editor for The Goshen News. Follow her on Twitter at @sselman_TGN or on Facebook at Sheila Selman Journalist.

One of my favorite places in the world is Martin Branch in Mousie, Ky.

What’s the attraction? Peace and family history.

Mousie itself is off the beaten track. I bet no more than 500 people live in town and nearby hollows and branches. Mousie has a post office, a park, an elementary school and a volunteer fire department. It used to have a little store and a gas station/convenience store, but those are just vacant buildings now. I am hoping a local entrepreneur will reopen them.

Just outside of “downtown Mousie” is Martin Branch. You drive down a single-lane road that you cannot even see from the main route. You’ll pass by homes still owned by the Martins, the Campbells and the Huffs. But as you get into the hollow, it’s mainly owned by Gibson family members. Not all of them have Gibson as their last names, but they all descend from the same person, John P. Gibson.

We still aren’t clear if John P. purchased the land, or if it was his son (my great-grandpa) Ezekiel Gibson. My grandpa, Van Gibson, owned a good chunk of the mountain, which he left to his children. My dad is the only one who still lives there. Dad’s uncle Carl and his late uncle Junior own most of the rest of the property.

Even our Gibson family cemetery is located there.

I love visiting, taking hikes and picking shoestring, or whatever else happens to be in season. One of my favorite things to do is just to sit outside, watch the birds and relax. The sound of the creek rushing, water flowing off the mountain and into dad’s frog pond and the birds singing soothes my soul. Well, until the frogs start. They are so loud you cannot think.

Each year, my family takes a trip back to our hometown of Ligonier, Indiana, to visit Fashion Farm.

Along with a variety of pumpkins and mums, Fashion Farm is home to Fantasyland and a restaurant.

Fantasyland is all about what you can contrive with pumpkins, gourds and some ingenuity. This year’s theme is Superheroes. Some of the annual displays are still there: the hall of presidents, including this year’s candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton with an empty seat bearing a question mark between them; Dolly Parton; and Snoopy.

Plenty of Marvel Comics superheroes fill the dried corn stock-lined path, along with a few villains. But the everyday heroes — firefighter, police officers and even basketball players — receive their own due.

Alas, no journalists defending the first amendment made the cut.

After visiting Fantasyland, wander on out to a couple of mazes and the old jail, which is a cell from one of the city’s old lockups.

But before you leave, don’t forget to buy some homemade pumpkin doughnuts and pumpkin ice cream. Trust me. You will love them!

It’s the first day of spring break, so I took my daughter for a spring nature hike. We wanted to see what was popping up out of the ground. Thank goodness there weren’t any critters popping up to surprise us!
Here are a few of our finds:

And we had to end the nature hike with a game of flying disc with the dog!

I like a challenge.
So when our women’s group at church developed a 40-day challenge to help us improve our personal discipline and relationship with God, I was in.
Each week has its own set of challenges.
This is the first week and we have been tasked with:
1 — Giving up sweets for a week, except for a one-time indulgence.
2 — Giving up TV and movies for the week.
3 — Playing children’s games for 20 minutes twice during the week.
4 — Memorizing a few verses out of Ephesians.
5 — Reading a Proverb a day.
6 — Writing a letter of support to someone on our pastoral staff.
Those are the biggies.
They don’t sound like much, do they? But try it.What I feel in control about:
I’m not having a problem keeping my sweet tooth under control. Although I could seriously use a breath mint after eating most days.
And TV is not a big deal for me to give up either. However, I’m catching incidentals. I haven’t made my family give up TV, so while I’m busy doing other things in the house, I’m catching unintentional snippets.
I also really wanted to go see “Olympus Has Fallen” this week, but I’m (crossing my fingers) sure it will be in the theaters once this part of the challenge is finished.Difficult but not impossible
Playing children’s games is my downfall. I have an 8-year-old daughter and she’s ready to play with me, but we’ve had a lot on our plates this week. We did math drills tonight, does that count?
I don’t think taking Grandma to the funeral home for a viewing counts either.
I’ll figure it out. It’s 20 minutes out of my day — a challenge NOT an impossibility.Help! I’ve failed again!
I’m a slacker on reading my Bible, doing devotions and praying. I admit it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy that part of my spiritual life, I’m just lazy sometimes.
My You Version reminder to read my Bible at 9 p.m. pops up on my iPad and I think, “In just a little bit. First I need to check out Pinterest.”
Seriously?! What am I doing? “Uh, sorry God, pinning styles from New York Fashion Week is more important right now.” Come on!
Again these are small things, but they need to be done daily to build consistency and self-discipline.
So that’s why I’m doing this challenge. I need to kick myself in the butt and put God first.
If I can succeed in that discipline, I can succeed in others.
God bless.

Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control. (Proverbs 25:28 NIV)

Look in my pantry and on my kitchen counters and you’ll notice one thing — for a person trying to thin down I have a lot of junk food and candy.
There’s a lot of healthy food, too, but in every dieter’s self-help article one of the first golden rules to dieting is to divest your home of junk food.
That particular golden rule was making me fat.
After binge eating on a package of cookies, pie, potato chips — whatever and sometimes all at the same time — I would feel horrible. Not because of all the crap I’d just put in my body, but because I felt I had absolutely no self control. I’d beat myself up and think, “I could throw this all up.” But I chose punishment instead. “You ate it,” I would think to myself. “Now you’ve got to suffer the consequences, so no throwing up.”
My cabinets were bare of those temptations, but a grocery store was just down the street. If I brought home a package of Oreos, it would be gone in a day. If I brought home a bag of Seyfert’s BBQ potato chips, it would be gone in one episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (This was the early 1990s.)
Finally, one day it dawned on me: Depriving myself of having junk food in the house was not working. What if I did the exact opposite?
What if I stopped forbidding myself? Isn’t the call of the forbidden more tempting than what’s good?
So that’s what I did. I bought those Oreos and barbecued chips. I stuck them in my pantry and I binged for many months.
Fortunately for me I was working out two hours a day, otherwise I would have gained 50 pounds.
And then one day, the binging stopped.
The cookies, the chips — they didn’t call to me from the cabinets. They stayed there for a couple of months untouched.
I believe my brain finally made the switch from “forbidden feast” to “so what.”
I haven’t had a problem with binge eating since. Do I ever overeat? Yes, but not a binge. Do I ever eat those chips? Yes, but a handful and I’m done.
I found I do have self control.
And thank God, because I don’t have two hours a day to workout anymore! I’m lucky to get in an hour!
So yes, I have a tub of Snickers bars in my pantry, along with a tub of Halloween and Christmas candy. There is a jar of M&Ms on my counter. There is a cookie canister filled with an assortment of mini-candy bars. And my freezer always has ice cream in it.
And 98 percent of the time, I don’t touch any of it or even think about it being there. The 2 percent of the time I do get a craving for it, I know it’s there. I eat a small portion of it and I’m satisfied.
People — especially dieters — walk into my home and shake their head in wonder. “How do you do it?” they ask. “If I had all of this in my house, I’d be fat!”
“You know me,” I tell my friends. “I’ve got to do everything backwards.”

Thanks for reading! If you’ve had any experiences with binge eating or want to share how you stopped binging, please feel free to write me.
Sheila